John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” is rightly included in any anthology of poetry from the First World War. It alone has become required reading for most Remembrance Day memorials, and can also be credited with making the poppy the symbol for the butchering on the Western front. But such a summary inevitably fails to communicate McCrae’s original intent when composing the poem in 1915.
This poem was not written to implore for the war’s end, or even to force the reconsideration of military strategy, but rather as a plea for more troops to enlist in the war, lest the sacrifices of so many be counted in vain.
Rupert Brooke best describes, in his poem “The Soldier,” what many saw as the true aim of the conflict, especially amongst those enlisted legions during the early days of WWI: “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”
This view of the war would survive for many even after its end, but as the war years progressed, soldiers on the front lines began to doubt their eventual catapult over the trenches. By the middle of the war, the pre-war years had already become immortalized for the lost innocence contained within their boundaries.
World powers used the Archduke’s assassination as the premise upon which to wage the First World War, readjust their own territories, confirm their countries’ boundaries, and assert their own power. The poetry of the latter war years embodies the notion that, because of this hunger for power, the youth of a new generation had to mature in the drudges of trenches.
It was this realization that would soon materialize, that would see Brooke’s poetry and the sentiments of McCrae replaced by sentiments of writers such as Wilfred Owen. Almost as if he was responding to the mentality, not only of Brooke, but of the many who believed in the war’s cause, Owen wrote in 1916, after watching a fellow soldier succumb to a German gas attack, a warning to those who believed in the idea that war would bring a soldier glory.
Owen, who would die before the signing of the Armistice, began the chorus of soldiers who felt themselves needlessly sacrificed and killed, sent out of the trenches and into “no man’s land” to pay their share of the butcher’s bill. Horribly, history confirms just that.
For instance, the Battle of the Somme would see the death of 400,000 troops for 12 kilometres of territory, which when gained, added nothing to the prospects of Allied victory. Even that number is deceiving; the figure is only the British count, and is probably an underestimate if the casualties of the first day alone remained constant.
Owen’s apt phrase that the “poetry is in the pity,” seems to ask that, whenever one wears a poppy, or sits through a Remembrance Day memorial, they remember those troops and their suffering — something their poetry tried to give a voice to.
